Is Climate Change Causing Pre-traumatic Stress Disorder in Millennials? - In These Times
For the better part of a century, from Hiroshima through the Cold War, people around the world lived in visceral fear of nuclear annihilation.
...
Today’s youth live with a different kind of dread.
...Last year, the American Association for the Advancement of Science warned that
within a few decades, climate change will have “massively disruptive consequences to societies and ecosystems,” including widespread famines, lethal heat waves, more frequent and destructive natural disasters, and social unrest.
Despite the litany of warnings like these, governments have utterly failed to take meaningful action.
At this point, climate change can be limited or accelerated, and humans can adapt to some degree, but significant damage to the planetary ecosystem can no longer be averted.
According to
Washington, D.C.- based forensic psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren, the expectation of climate-change disasters is causing “pre-traumatic stress disorder.”
In an interview with Esquire in July, she explains that
the symptoms look much like those of post-traumatic stress disorder: “the anger, the panic, the obsessive, intrusive thoughts.”
...Katie Herzog, an environmental journalist for Grist, says it’s “something easier to ignore if you don’t work in the business”—her friends are probably tired of hearing that “the planet is going to shit.”
She’s “worried about the world that children will inherit,” and thinks
it’s “irresponsible to have kids. I take solace that I’m not bringing life into the world that’s going to suffer.”
...A 2007 poll of more than a thousand middle schoolers found that almost
60 percent feared climate change more than terrorism, car crashes or cancer.
Roughly the same percentage thought more needed to be done to combat the threat, and more than 40 percent reported that concern about climate change occasionally occupies their minds.
...In response to her own anxieties surrounding climate change, poet and Brown University English lecturer Kate Schapira, 36, set up a booth in 2014—
modeled after Lucy’s 5-cent psychiatric service in the Peanuts comic strip—offering “climate anxiety counseling.”
She recorded the resulting conversations with strangers, acquaintances and loved ones on her blog. One anonymous interviewee describes getting “hives sophomore year of college thinking about climate change.”
Another visitor to Schapira's booth says, “My entire life, climate change has been in my awareness … and I think it should worry everyone.”
...The burden placed on the shoulders of today’s youth remains enormous. They must learn to live in the midst of an existential threat without precedent. Though survival depends on collective action, each will forge his or her own understanding of a world in flux.
...As he brings his campaign to news outlets like MSNBC, scientists continue to research mass extinctions, journalists continue to document human and nonhuman suffering, and students continue to stage sit-ins and petition drives. Climate change leads some to a dark mental place, but for many there is meaning in resistance..."
Read on and marvel that these fruitcakes can even dress themselves.
